I can’t do it. Try as I might, I just can’t make it in and out of the grocery store in less than 90 minutes. People talk about losing track of time in the casinos in Vegas. Phooey. I grab hold of that grocery cart and next thing I know, the sun is coming up.


My dear wife tried shopping with me a few times and then couldn’t stand it anymore. To be honest, I’m not sure what the problem is. I always have a list with me and I don’t do a lot of impulse buying, so it’s not like I’m wasting time getting non-essential items. I am a big nutrition label reader though, so maybe that’s my downfall. Plus I enjoy examining new products that I notice on the shelves.

Being a time-impaired shopper, my interest was piqued when I read about the work that Sorensen Associates is doing. The Portland, Ore., research firm has been mapping individual grocery shopping trips using PathTracker, a system that incorporates pager-sized transmitters on shopping carts that emit signals every four seconds which are tracked by an array of antennae in a store. By overlaying these readings on a detailed planogram of the store, the company can show where each shopper went, the routes they took to get there, where they stopped, how long they stopped, etc.

The system was tested at a Thriftway store in suburban Portland over a five-month period. The company’s president, Herb Sorensen, has presented the results from this and other tests at recent industry conferences.

The conventional wisdom is that people walk up and down each aisle in the grocery store, and many people think they shop that way but they really don’t, Sorensen says. Some shoppers follow what Sorensen calls the racetrack, tracing a broad circle around the store by visiting areas along its periphery, with occasional forays into the center aisles for specific items. Some folks wander, tracing paths back and forth over large portions of the store and moving up and down most of the aisles (hmm...that sounds familiar). Others show an admirable amount of discipline, making a beeline for their destination, getting the products they need and heading toward the checkout, with few if any side trips on the way.

Only a small percentage of shoppers traverse the entire store. Most visit only half or less of it. The average shopping trip lasts 17 minutes and covers 1,569 feet. In that time, 28 percent of the store is covered, with 32 stops/pauses to purchase 5.8 items at a cost of $14.97.

In terms of the dollar volume of purchases, the peak sales occur at about the 70 percent point in the trip. Purchasing does not occur evenly across the trip.

Three factors

When talking to manufacturers, Sorensen cites three crucial factors that affect the shopping process. The first is effective distribution. “Simply getting products into the store doesn’t cut it,” he says. “You have not effectively distributed the product until you put it in front of the shopper. Merely having it in the same building as they’re in is not distribution.”

The second is a process Sorensen calls double conversion. Once you have a consumer in front of your product, you have to get them to stop and consider it, and then they have to put it in their cart. That’s where packaging and point-of-purchase materials play such a vital role.

The third is buy speed, i.e., how long it takes for the process to occur. “A very high percentage of shopping in the center store aisles is excursion shopping, where people come down an aisle and turn around and go back out,” he says. “Many people go around the racetrack with a jog in here and there to pick up something. What this means is, you see a heck of a lot more traffic at the end of an aisle than at the middle. So if you want high exposure, you need to be near the end of the aisle.”

But there are also offsetting considerations about speed. The research shows that people shop faster at the end of the aisle. So if the product is something that requires a bit of examination by consumers, a manufacturer may be better off with a placement further down the aisle.

“For example, it takes people a long time to buy squeeze mayonnaise. So, as the manufacturer, if you are selling this product, how can you expedite people’s decision to buy? I guarantee you that that long consideration time is deterring sales, because people aren’t really sure they want it. They are picking it up, looking at it, turning it over, wondering if it would work, etc. That long buy speed is not favorable. We can provide a manufacturer with a list of the buy speeds for every item in their category and they can see if they have products that take a long time to buy, particularly relative to competitive items, which could help them make decisions on where their products should be placed.”

A helpful addition to all of this information would be some good old-fashioned observational research, followed by interviews to find out, for example, why it took that person so long to pick that product.

For the most part, if I want an item, I don’t care where it’s located, on an end cap, in the middle of the aisle, or on a bottom shelf. But it makes sense to have a product whose purchase requires a bit of rumination located near the middle of an aisle — if only because there’s usually more room for fellow shoppers to maneuver around you as you stand wondering if that new dinner-in-a-box is really so easy to prepare. On the other hand, if you’re causing a log jam in the packaged dinners aisle, you may just toss the box in your cart and tell your overanalytical side to shut up (don’t do that kind of thing out loud; it draws fearful looks).

Location, location, location

For all this talk about where the product is located, Sorensen says that the shopper’s location is the dominant factor controlling in-store behavior. People spend more time at the beginning of their trip shopping and buying than they do at the end. The closer they get to the exit, the faster they go. “If you look at certain areas, such as the center store aisles, 85 percent of shoppers’ behavior is driven by their location in the store and 15 percent by the product they are seeking,” he says. “For example, people don’t tend to buy salad dressing in a uniform amount of time. If they encounter salad dressing at the beginning of their trip, it takes them three times as long as it would if they sought salad dressing at the end of their shopping trip.”

Blame that end-of-trip rushing on what Sorensen calls the Checkout Magnet. “That has huge implications and raises a number of questions,” he says. “Why are they shopping faster? Are they getting tired? Do they want to get out of there? Are they more sure of what they are buying later on?”

If they’re like me, they’ve probably glanced at their watch and realized that their worried spouse back home is minutes away from sending out a search party for them.